GAINESVILLE- Gainesville's Fleet Maintenance Garage and Public Works Materials Storage Facility have a new home. This new building with over 40,000 square feet of operational space and about 150,000 square feet for storage, took a little more than a year to complete and cost the city $10.7 million. Bob Woods a spokesperson with the City of Gainesville, said, "It's a beautiful facility... It's a state of the art facility. It's really going to enhance our ability to provide service of all of the city's fleet vehicles and what that does actually, is help us to provide better service to the community as a whole."

The road which cost about $826,000 was also built as part of the project's budget. The city plan to have it connect to 13th street, sometime in the near future. Bill Malcolm the General Services Director said, "We've got folks that are focusing on heavy equipment and light equipment at two locations, we have to make sure that we have staff for that... Now we can focus on having it all in one location. We can take care of and do a one stop shop for maintaining our equipment."

For years, the city's fleet was divided between the public works facility off Northwest 39th Avenue and another facility on Southeast 5th Avenue. Noise concerns from the nearby Stephen Foster Community were one of the reasons city commissioners voted to bring the two together in 2007. "One of the reasons for consolidating city maintenance facilities is really to take those type of services out of residential communities where there is the possibility that late night services or early morning services could disturb residents," Woods said.

The old Public Works facility borders the Koppers Superfund Property. A worry for some neighbors like Maria Parsons. She is one of the residents who started the petition to move the fleet in 2007. Parson said, "The reason we wanted the materials storage moved... It was not just the material storage, it was also the Public Works compound where they fixed the property and it was the noise, the pollution and all the dust emanating from the site that was constantly coming into our property." Parsons says beyond the noise, she's glad employees are no longer forced to work on the site's contaminated soils.